What's Up Doc? by Carbon/Silicon

How creativity occurs

"When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions."

"Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with."

From a Newsweek article about "The Creativity Crisis", written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

Also, the brain goes into a creativity turbo mode and locks out any distractions by deactivating the right-temporoparietal junction when improvising. However, that turbo mode only kicks in when you are highly trained/skilled in the field that you are improvising in. In this context, doing intensive Po thinking in any field probably qualifies as "improvising", I would think.

RingoJS vs NodeJS

George Moschovitis of AppengineJS fame, the Javascript port of the Google App Engine Python SDK, wrote a blog post looking at RingoJS vs NodeJS:

"Some time ago I switched from Narwhal to Ringo and never looked back. I strongly believe that Ringo is the preeminent CommonJS implementation."

"Ringo is mature, stable and crash free. Ringo is the evolution of Helma, one of the first server side JavaScript platforms (more than 10 years in development)."

"Access to the gazillion of Java libraries. There is no merit in reinventing the wheel, just reuse code from the Java ecosystem. The integration between Java and JavaScript is seamless."

"Thanks to AppengineJS you can run your Ringo applications on Google's scalable infrastructure." [actually, you can do that with Ringo out-of-the-box, but with AppengineJS you get the ported Python SDK APIs, which is nice, of course]

And his conclusion: "Stop drinking the Kool-Aid! Stop playing with toys. Engineer your application on top of a mature, conformant and compatible platform: RingoJS."

Sweet People by Alyosha

Stupid people! ...for not making Alyosha from the Ukraine the Eurovision 2010 winner with this song. Not only a great song and a great voice, but also a song with a message and a singer/songwriter with a mission: http://www.alyoshamission.com/

RingoJS 0.5 released

RingoJS 0.5 was released on May 19, 2010. Get it from the download page on GitHub!

0.5 is much better than 0.4 in most every respect. These are the highlights:

• Increased coverage of API documentation
• Package support , including simple installation via ringo-admin
• Update Filesystem support, now covers full CommonJS Filesystem/A and Filesystem/A/0 except globbing
• New HTTP Client supporting both synchronous and asynchronous operation
• Upgrade to JSGI 0.3
• Upgrade to Jetty 7 with improved support for asynchronous JSGI
• Several new modules ( base64 , promise , subprocess , zip , basicauth )
• Shared modules are now default, resulting in increased performance and less WTF moments
• More command line and servlet options, including production switch to disable module reloading
• Evolutionary improvements in Storage API

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release with code, bug reports, or feedback:

• Panagiotis Astithas
• Andreas Bolka
• Chris Langreiter
• George Moschovitis
• Peter Newhook
• Simon Oberhammer
• Oleg Podsechin
• Robert Thurnher
• Samuli Tuomola
• Hannes Wallnöfer
• "ccwu"

A screencast showing installation of packages, getting API documentation for them, and use of the asynchronous HTTP client in combination with the ringo-cometd package:

Your Personal Religion by Sophie Hunger

"Invisible" is another stand-out track on the same album. However, for now that track honors its name and there so far seems to be no video for it.

Album review by John Brunner.

Lost and Found by Steve Mason

>>> RhinoJS